Zugl.: Mainz, Univ., Diss., 2007

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1982. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 245-252).

This project seeks to unpack and moderate the postmodern debate surrounding James Joyce's 1922 novel, Ulysses, by examining how the text responds to global-local dichotomies, be they geographical or conceptual, and considering its stylistics in light of these themes. In doing so, it casts the likes of Laurence Sterne, Walt Whitman, Joseph Conrad, Gertrude Stein, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Bob Dylan and Kurt Vonnegut, among others, alongside Joyce, connecting similar themes and stylistic responses. Ultimately, it suggests that the avant-garde response on the part of Joyce and these others is not necessarily a manifesto bolstering the style, but a reminder to the interpreter to not take the ability of traditional narrative to subsume the surprisingly complex local moment of experience as given. Instead of being "anti-art," as these avant-garde stylistics are often accused of, these aesthetics place new value on the old aesthetic and the act of interpretation, asking the interpreter to perennially re-evaluate the old and given amid the continuously new and complex local moment of experience resulting from the convergence of contrast brought on by the dynamically mapped globe in the process of globalization.

This thesis will be an attempt to gather together the important ideas set forth in Whitman's early writing which are to be found also in Emerson's lectures, essays, and poems written before 1855. It will attempt to show what Whitman might have gained from Emerson if he had had no other source, and if a creative intellect had not the power of originating its own ideas.

THE BLIND ARCADE is a collection of poems chronicling several of the pressing conditions of contemporary American life: poverty and class, sex, violence, hunger, longing and mourning, and the inverse of the latter, requited love and emotional ecstasy. The poems are set in crowded markets, on trains and in apartment bedrooms, city squares and campus quads, dentist chairs, bridges, riverbanks, and kitchens. This contemporary and familiar backdrop dictates the form of most of these poems to be free verse, although terza rima, ekphrastic, haiku, and prose forms are also utilized. The book presents its poems in three sections. As if a series of decorative arches in a blind arcade, they are not broken down into themes. Rather, they are each utilized and are ordered around the weight of their individual topics to demonstrate the capriciousness of life.

The Mystic Trumpeter is intended to reflect and comment on the meaning of the poem of the same name featured in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Formally the individual movements are approximately simple territory ternary in form; however, cyclical treatment of the opening motive is the main structural concept of the work, and its appearance throughout the composition is controlled entirely by the recurring connotations of the poetry.

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